I’ve done one post about looking back at book releases in 2021. Now it’s time to look forward to 2022. I’ve got a tradition of posting a short story on my website at New Year. When I checked through my set of partially-written pieces, most were interconnected with other unpublished pieces, so too spoilerish to use. I did discover an Earth Girl prequel story featuring Fian though, which should be perfectly safe for anyone to read. It’s also especially appropriate for a New Year story, since it’s set at Year End 2788, and features Fian leaving his home world of Hercules to go and start his Pre-history Foundation course on Earth.

The snag is that this piece a partially written novella with a significant amount of story still to tell. Two years ago I posted a Jarra serial that got totally out of hand, but proved very popular with people in the gloom of the starting pandemic. The news isn’t exactly cheerful at the moment either, so let’s do the serial thing again.

Those of you who watched laughing as first Jarra and then Drago were trusted with the microphone to dictate short pieces to their author, only to refuse to give it back, will be laughing again now. I’m confident of keeping Fian under control though. He’s not a member of the Tell clan, is a generally well-behaved character, and crucially I have a cunning plan to stop him running away with the microphone.

That plan is to tidy up the existing eight chapters of the novella, and post them at the rate of one chapter a week. I’ll then add chapter nine which will take the story to a temporary end point. The serial will then remain on the website for a while before eventually vanishing to be extended to include the rest of the story, polished, revised, and published. It will probably be published under the title Deltan Escape but that is only a working title for the moment.

For anyone interested in how Deltan Escape fits into the other Portal Future stories, the relevant  sequence is:-

• Delta Sector 2788 featuring Fian. (Published in Earth 2788: The Earth Girl Short Stories)
• Year End 2788 featuring Lecturer Playdon. (Published in Earth Prime: The Earth Girl Aftermath Stories 1)
• Deltan Escape featuring Fian.
• If all goes according to plan, the final extended version of Deltan Escape will link into the start of Earth Girl.

You can read the first chapter of the serial here.

For the latest news on everything else planned for 2022, please check the Coming Next page.

Best wishes to you all in the coming year!

Janet Edwards